


Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here

by Anonymous



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bad Ending, Emotional Manipulation, Fucked Up, Hurt No Comfort, I'm Going To Hell For This, Isolation, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Please Don't Kill Me, Psychological Torture, Sexual Abuse, Stockholm Syndrome, What Have I Done
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-31
Updated: 2019-05-31
Packaged: 2020-04-05 05:06:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19041721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Something on his face must have betrayed him, because Dante hummed as though in triumph. “You’re just deluding yourself.”“Ididn’t kill Al.”A thin smile. “You didn’tsavehim, either.”Everything went wrong. Al is gone, Dante has the Stone, and Ed is a prisoner to the fanciful whims of his new captor.





	Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here

**Author's Note:**

> This has to be the most twisted shit I've ever written. Seriously, guys, this is NOT for sensitive viewers. I'm not even joking. This is some seriously hardcore dark shit that you're about to wade into. It's all misery and unhappiness and pain beyond your wildest comprehension.
> 
> If you honestly think you can handle that, keep going. But if not, I kindly (and strongly) advise that you hurry up and get the fuck out of here.
> 
> Oh, and grab your pitchforks and torches and your exorcist circles. You're gonna need them.
> 
> You have been warned.

There was nothing he could do.

That is what Ed tells himself when he wakes with a tapered cry in his throat, with images of Gluttony devouring Al seared into his eyelids, remembering the crush of Envy’s grip pinning him to the floor as he _screamed_ —

There was nothing he could do. There was nothing he could do.

But that doesn’t stop him from bending over himself as though his spine simply gave up trying to hold him upright. Doesn’t stop the broken noise that rattles in his ribcage and tears itself from his throat. Doesn’t stop him from remembering with a sickening and heart-rending clarity that his little brother is dead.

It doesn’t stop him from thinking,  _I failed._

* * *

He doesn’t know where he is—not really. Dante must have done the same thing to him that she did to Rose before slipping into her body, the thing that left Rose dizzy and dreamy and her eyes smoked with delirium. Something that made him suggestable and pliant, allowed her to hasten him away from the underground city without any protest or struggle.

When he came to, Rose stood before him draped in rich royal purple satin and a black mink coat and pearls dripping from her throat. She was cupping his chin in her desert-browned fingers and smiling in a way that Rose would never smile and he knew immediately, with a sinking sensation of utter dread, that this was not Rose at all.

“Good morning, Edward,” she crooned in a melodious voice that didn’t belong to her, running her thumb over his cheekbone in a mockery of tenderness. It revolted him. “How did you sleep?”

His thrashing and writhing only served to inform him that he was tied up, bound in thick chords to a chair that looked like it belonged in an old manor, all crushed velvet and tarnished gold trimming. His efforts must have amused her, because she brought a hand to her lips and giggled.

They had left Amestris, or so she said. The country’s border was far beyond them, perhaps an entire continent away—she was dodgy about those details, as though she knew the ambiguity would rankle him (and it did, it so did). Where they are now, she refused to say, only that it was some obscure little village that Ed had never heard of, much less ever appeared on the military’s radar. No one would ever find them here.

“With Pride’s death, staying in Amestris wasn’t exactly safe for us anymore.” She said “us” as though the two of them were joined at the hip, two halves of one greater whole, which left him vaguely tasting bile in the back of his throat. But if she noticed his reaction, then she didn’t heed it, only going on to cluck her tongue as though in distaste. “The military is reforming in the wake of their Fuhrer’s death. I bet they think they’re on the verge of some glorious future, and never consider once that they’ll fall into the all same traps.” Her newly-acquired brown shoulders lifted into a graceful, careless shrug. “Oh well. That’s the folly of mankind for you.”

Even though this was meant to be the depreciating speech, what struck out to Ed most was the news that Colonel Bastard had succeeded in killing the Fuhrer, in ridding Dante of her stronghold over the government and all its bloody ventures. The revelation sent a visceral thrill of satisfaction through him. Even if Dante had the Stone, she no longer had Amestris in her pocket. No matter what she said about mankind and old pitfalls, things would start to change for the better.

It was a small foothold, Ed would admit, but the little flicker of a bright side gave him some strength. Enough to flash a smirk at her. “Considering you lost your pawn to them, it sounds like the only folly’s yours.”

The only warning he received was a quicksilver flash in her expression before she struck him hard across the face.

“Make no mistake,” she said coolly as his vision flashed black and white with the force of the blow, his head thrown back so hard he felt his neck crack, “this is only a minor setback. With the Stone, I can create as many homunculi as I wish.”

When his vision settled again, she was once again cupping his chin with her—Rose’s—hand and leaning in so close that they were forced to share the same space of breath. He braced himself for vitriol, for spitting profanities and a litany of threats at having dismantled her safety net and left her plan with massive holes through which any amount of chaos could slip through and collapse the foundations entirely. He braced himself, because he may have failed in one part but succeeded in others, and she was forced to flee. Surely she would lash out at him for this setback.

But she only smiled, soft and serene. Another person’s face tugged by the invisible strings of her parasitic will. “For example—how about your brother? Wouldn’t you _love_ to have Alphonse back?”

A snarl left him and he lunged—or tried, in total vain, since he was still tied up. She watched for a long moment with half-lidded violet eyes before she turned away, evidently bored. His face was left burning with a combination of rage and humiliation as she departed in a whisper of silken skirts.

That night he screamed his throat raw and raged into the darkness until rage gave way to grief and he wept over his brother, his little brother, who he tried to protect and failed miserably and  _I’m so sorry_ ,  _this is all my fault_ —

The next day (he thought it was the next day), Ed woke in a bed. In plush sheets and to pine-green walls and with a warm breakfast waiting for him on the nightstand next to his pillow. He knocked it over, sent it clattering and smearing across the floor while snarling threats at the empty air, swearing he was going to _kill_ her for what she’d done to Al, he swears to God or the Gate or whatever it is that people look to lay the weight of their vengeance upon, he’ll _fucking kill_ _her_.

Then he realized his arm was gone.

He howled his voice hoarse. There isn’t much worth remembering, after that. Only grief and rage and pain and weeping it all out—it echoed off the walls, because there was no one else to hear.

* * *

As of yet, he’s had no way of testing whether or not she was telling the truth about their location. It looks like they’re in a mansion somewhat similar to the one she had on the outskirts of Dublith, but he wasn’t there long enough to know the halls intimately and he can’t be sure that this isn’t the same place.

All the windows are blanketed in curtains that are knotted up tight by ribbons he would pull loose and then throw aside for a glimpse of the outside world, if not for the fact that she removed his arm and no matter how hard he tugs at the knots, they won’t come loose. Most of the doors are locked. The halls are winding and twisting and he can’t find his bearings, leaving him with only vague ideas of where is where and how long some of the halls are but not where they lead.

It’s made even harder with the fact that she sedates him more frequently than he has fingers and toes to count on—he usually comes out of it with hazy recollections and a floating sensation like his bones were filled with helium and the inability to recall what he was last thinking about. The days when she actually leaves him aware, leaves his mind clear and sharp, are a handful at best and only done so at the whims of her amusement. She probably takes a sick and twisted pleasure in seeming him like this, snarling from the frustration of his own helplessness as he struggles to navigate hallways, look for a way out, an escape, something, anything.

Some mornings he’ll wake to find what used to be Rose sitting at the end of his bed, and she’ll smile like a knife aimed at his jugular (Rose would never smile like that, she was tempered strength and resilience but there was nothing sharp about her) under the guise of pleasantness. She’ll ask how he slept in a voice like honey that belies the cold intelligence in her eyes, then giggle into her fingertips as he stumbles free of the blankets. There’s a snide comment dressed as a purr while he tries to shake the lingering haze from his mind and makes to throttle her or something—and then she’ll just transmute the bedsheets into restraints and chide him for trying to attack a woman while he thrashes and snarls and looses a litany of profanities at her.

“What a brute,” she tutted once, when he was panting and gasping for breath and still trying to rip himself free despite the apparent pointlessness of the endeavor.

“Says the bitch who murdered  _literal thousands_ ,” he snarled, voice hoarse from screaming. The cloth bit into his wrist with every harsh tug, threatening to dislocate his elbow if he pulled too hard.

She arched a thin, plucked brow. A brow that wasn’t hers. “Are you  _always_  this self-righteous?”

“ _Fuck_  you.”

“I must tell you, your morals don’t help you in the long run.” With a chilling smile, she reached out to lightly tap him on the nose. “Trust me. I know.”

It felt like a chiding gesture, but in a way that was far too intimate for his taste. He bristled beneath it, snapped his teeth as though trying to take her finger off—she drew back, her eyes half-lidded as though in amusement, lips curled back as though she wanted to laugh.

“Oh, don’t be like that, Edward.” She leaned back a little, causing the liquid cobalt draping her to shift and shimmer in satiny undulations. Glittering sapphires clustered around her waistline as though springing from a wound that bled gemstones and then dripped across the sparkling gauzy skirt in gleaming smatters. With the way morning light knifed out from a single, narrow slit in the bedroom curtains, illuminating her the glory of daylight, you’d have almost called her beautiful. “You know, I think we might be able to get along. Two brilliant alchemists under the same roof? Why, what’s so terrible about that?”

“Don’t lump me in with the likes of  _you_ ,” he hissed back, because he’s always running into some whackjob or another that tries to convince them there’s a likeness between him and he’s honestly fucking  _sick_  of it.

She rolled her eyes, more from boredom than from any actual exasperation. “Like I said, moral high grounds amount to nothing. You think you’re better than me? Than anyone else in the world? What—because you’ve set a few boundaries for yourself?” Then she leaned forward, setting the curvature of her newly brown chin upon a gloved white hand. Her eyes gleamed like polished jewels. “How did that work out for you?”

In his mind’s eye, Ed saw Greed seizing up after the wound he struck proved fatal without him even realizing it. Saw the wreckage of Liore after the soldiers stormed the streets and battered the population. Saw Sheska’s face, the heartrending sorrow in her large eyes, as she murmured about Mr. Hughes’s death. Saw Sloth evaporating into thin air with a smile so much like Mom’s that he  _aches_.

Something on his face must have betrayed him, because Dante hummed as though in triumph. “You’re just deluding yourself.”

“ _I_  didn’t kill Al.”

A thin smile. “You didn’t  _save_  him, either.”

Red flared across his vision, then, and he  _spat_. Droplets of saliva landed on a translucent sleeve.

Anger briefly darkened her features, and for a moment, she looked inclined to strike him. The memory of his cheek left bruised and stinging beneath her slap that first day still lingered with him, leaving ashamed to say that he flinched when she brought her hands up.

But she only clapped, then transmuted the befoulment away in a snap of alchemic blue-white. “Now  _that_  was uncalled for.”

Ignoring her, he raised the binding to his mouth and started working at it with his teeth. One way or another, it would tear.

“Don’t do that,” she admonished, almost like she was speaking to a child that she’d had to scold repeatedly. To something as grotesquely old as her, he probably must have been a child. “It’s not dignified.”

Like he gave half a shit what she thought of him. He ground his jaw around the linens in his mouth. “Why’re you even  _here_?”

An odd combination of hurt and cold amusement overcame her stolen face. Cold amusement, he bought, because everything he does seemed to ignite the glitter of icy laughter in her eyes. The hurt, though—that was just a façade. “Don’t you want the company?”

He all but spat the cloth out. “Not from  _you_.”

She blinked, staring at him for a moment in silent contemplation. Then she clapped, grazing her fingertips across the bedsheets with all the delicateness of someone caressing a newly-bloomed petal. He jolted in alarm when the binding around his wrist suddenly loosened, falling away with a harmless flutter of linens.

Before he could react, or angrily demand what game she’s playing at, she rose in a susurrus of silk and satin and clinking sapphires. “Well, alright then,” she said, and left.

There are two more times after that before she suddenly disappears altogether, like the hiss of hot cinders being doused in rain, or the whisper of a prayer from the lips of a dying man, or a distant curl of smoke lost to the wind. Such an accomplishment is a victory, a triumph—he refuses to mourn the loss of her vile, conniving presence even when the silence pounds against him relentlessly and empty halls enclose him from all sides.

Why the  _hell_  would he miss her? She’s the one who only drugs him in the first place, keeps him a captive in a massive ornamental cage for her own amusement. She’s the one who seems intent on leaving him pliant, obedient, a prisoner not even aware of the bars that hold him in place. She’s the one who comes to taunt him, to drive in his frustration and helplessness and rub salt in wounds that still haven’t healed.

So what if she’s the only person he’s seen since he’s arrived? So what if she’s the only one he’s talked to in god knows how long? He raises his voice to the air and speaks to the walls, because having a conversation with himself is much better than sharing one with  _her_.

* * *

Ed keeps trying to figure out how long she’ll keep him under and how long he goes between days of clarity, if there’s a pattern or something. But the drug-ridden fogs leave it impossible to track time. The grandfather clock in what he thinks to be the parlor only keeps track of hours, not days or weeks or months. All the windows are bound up tight to avoid a glimpse of the outside.

He’s not even sure what season it is right now. What month. What year.

That’s a terrifying thought, that a decade could pass in the snap of an instant and he’d look in the mirror to find a stranger’s face staring back at him.

Thankfully, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Yet. His reflection is familiar, even if he often wakes to himself wearing clothes that aren’t his and look like they belong to an aristocratic dilettante—waistcoat and button shirt and dress slacks. And his hair is often pulled back into a sharp, streaming tail that makes it look deceptively like it’s gotten longer, but he can’t tell by how much. His jaw, too, has grown sharper with maturity and his shoulders are somewhat broader than he remembers, but it doesn’t look like years and years have passed him by in a smoky fugue state. At most, he usually just needs to shave (and he does), because he heavily suspects she has some weird plan to make him look more like Hohenheim, and isn’t that just the grossest and most twisted part of all of this?

Well, that and the fact that she literally crawled inside the body of a friend and made herself at home in it and now she’s using Rose’s face to taunt him, gaslight him, have his stomach lurching in his abdomen and his chest filling with ice every time he is reminded that, in the end, he’s the reason Rose is gone right now. That her son is motherless and a monster wears her flesh.

Or the drugging, something being slipped into his food or his water or somehow getting it into his system without his knowing and then leaving his mind smoky with delirium. He doesn’t even know what would have the capacity to  _do_  that, let alone how it could be administered.

Or the fact that this only happened because she had Gluttony devour Al whole while Ed watched and writhed and screamed and could do nothing and then she transmuted Gluttony away until only this shining red ore was left cupped in both hands.

Oh, hell, there’s a  _lot_  of things that are gross and twisted about this shit.

Anger is what propels him forward in the moments when he is sharp and clear-headed. It has him swallowing the grief that feels like hot glass shards in his throat and has him instead cementing himself in determination—to figure this out, understand,  _escape_.

Because no way in  _hell_  is he going to  _let_  her keep him _captive_ like this.

He suspects that he is not the only one here in this place, because he awakens with vague recollections of other faces, of strangers who speak with foreign accents, of footsteps in hallways and the smell of cooking food radiating from somewhere. It might mean that Dante has servants tending to the mansion in her stead—she doesn’t strike him as the type to do her own housework, probably why she took Lyra as her “apprentice” in the first place—but whenever his mind is crisp enough to think logically, he wanders empty halls devoid of human life.

Which means she must send them off when he’s awake and aware. Leaves him isolated and alone and wandering this gilded labyrinth like the Minotaur for all eternity. Aching and grieving and trying not to think about how long has passed since he failed his brother.

Or it could just all be engineered. For all he knows, those faces he sees echoes of in his foggy memories could just be Envy stretching himself into a different skin to torment Ed into thinking he isn’t alone, then is, and leave him feeling his helplessness all the more keenly. He’s not sure, because he hasn’t seen hide nor hair of the eldest homunculus since (Al died) the Stone was made. In the back of his mind, he has this hazy image of Envy standing before the Gate while demanding to see Hohenheim and then getting dragged in by nebulously shadowy arms, but he doesn’t know if it can be trusted or not, the way the edges blur like a dream that was clear when you woke but began to fade as daylight wears on your consciousness.

Every time Ed wakes up clear-headed, he always starts upright, breathes in and out to reassure himself that yes, he’s still attached to his own body, no, his thoughts aren’t thick as mud, he’s here and alive and awake and _aware_.

He looks around, hoping it’s all been a terrible dream, that he’ll find himself in a hotel in some distant corner of the country with Al sighing teasingly about how he needs to sleep less, it’s  _not_  healthy. Or maybe he’ll be at Granny’s, in the guest bedroom while Winry works on his arm after it was blown apart by Scar. Hell, even the couch in Colonel Bastard’s office where he sneaks in to sleep when the bastard is in a meeting and Ed gets tired of waiting for him. The military barracks, the guestroom in Mr. Hughes’s house, in Teacher’s house, a sleeper car on a train, anywhere—

But he sees the pine green wallpaper of the room that has apparently been designated as his and he pulls his legs to his chest and snarls under his breath in an attempt to keep the sharpness of helplessness at bay. It never seems to work. 

* * *

The crying of a baby wakes him.

Ed jolts upright, heart in his throat. A bad dream, probably. The guilt of remembering Rose and her unnamed child seeping into his subconscious and alighting echoes in the back of his skull. It’s not like Ed has any shortage of phantoms that visit him at night, wisps and specters that glide through his mind when sleep disarms him and then taunt him with how he let them down. Lately, though, Rose and Al and even Mom (or Sloth, sometimes they blur together, become this braided concept he can’t separate) have become the most frequent visitors.

But as the sleep clears from his mind—that, and what must be the lingering cobwebs of sedatives—the sound only grows clearer. Sharper. Drills into his eardrums.

Blinking, he stumbles free of the sheets and hastens down the hall, chasing the sound.

Walking without his arm is awkward. It leaves him unbalanced, tottering in an effort to remain upright without the familiar heft of steel to steady him. But he manages somehow, taking the occasional pause to lean against the wall then start forward again.

In the end, the sound leads him to a room where the door is slightly ajar—a phenomenon that has never occurred, as he’s always had to jiggle the handles to see what’s unlocked and what isn’t, even if it means tugging hard or trying to kick it down with his steel foot. But here the door gives away easily with he pushes it lightly, the hinges giving only a mild squeal of protest but no other resistance.

Stranger still is that the window mounted on the wall has the curtains parted, revealing a shock of clear and natural daylight that actually singes Ed’s eyes after having spent so long in the false mimicry of artificial lights. It pours in sharp-white, flooding across a carpeted floor that creaks beneath his footsteps, revealing hardwood underneath. The walls are different from the rest of the rooms in that they are draped in soft pastels rather rich, velvety colors like royal blue and maroon that themselves ooze class and wealth. And the source of the crying comes from a bassinette, the wood painted in a sharp porcelain white that looks almost like bones picked clean, like a ribcage rising up to enclose a bloody heart. At its bottom, red cushions and blankets the color of freshly-spilled blood only further this analogy, so it looks like you could puncture them and they would spill scarlet all over the carpet.

Stepping closer, Ed realizes there’s an infant tucked into the scarlet drapery. He—Ed thinks it’s a he, although he’s not entirely sure—possesses a full head of dark hair upon his brow like a crown of oil and a dusty brown face that implies desertic heritage but has turned reddish from the force of his crying. When Ed approaches, he starts to calm a little, the wailing dying down just a bit until it’s more of a petulant and pleading whimper than anything else.

“The hell did you come from?” Ed mutters, reaching out with his remaining hand. His gloves were lost months ago, so his bare fingers meet flushed and pudgy cheeks.

The baby hiccups, face wet from tears, but doesn’t answer. Ed doesn’t think he’s old enough to speak, but then again, he’s not exactly an expert on babies and their development or anything. He does remember that Elysia, when she was born, came into the world red and raw in a way only nascent things can be, and that her eyes were rheumy blue. He also vaguely remembers something about how it takes a few days for coloration to fill in, even on darker-skinned individuals, so all babies are born with blue eyes like that.

But the teary eyes this baby opens up are deep chestnut brown. His little mouth has front teeth. Actually, he’s so big that calling him a baby might be a mistake—he looks more like a very young toddler.

A pudgy hand reaches out to snag Ed’s thumb. There’s a fitful whine, like he’s afraid Ed will just up and vanish unless he grabs hold.  _Please don’t go_ , those wet brown eyes seem to say.

_...wait a sec._

Leaning forward, Ed looks again. Notices the shape of the nose, the shape of the ears, the shape of the chin. A deep shudder rolls through him, because it  _can’t_  have been that long—it  _can’t_  have been.

_Are you—?_

“They grow up so fast, don’t they?” croons a familiar voice from behind.

Ed whirls around to see her standing there in the doorway, casually leaning her shoulder against the doorframe, draped in a dusty pink shade that matches her dyed bangs and compliments her soft brown skin. Her arms are folded loosely over her chest, face drawn into a mimicry of a tender smile that belies the cold in her eyes. It’s the same look she greets him with in the mornings, or when he happens to find her sitting in the kitchen or reclining in the parlor. Casually—as though he isn’t rumbling with murderous rage, as though she didn’t murder his brother in front of him, as though he’s a petulant child yet to learn what he did wrong.

Now is no exception. The cock of her head is easy, the curve of her shoulders relaxed. She doesn’t even react to the harsh step forward he takes.

Rage and disgust sear through his veins, both at the realization and at her impassiveness. “This is Rose’s baby.”

“Lios.” Dante steps forward, silken skirt whispering at her heels as she crosses the carpeted floor. She makes for the bassinette, but Ed throws himself in her way—he’s not going to let her  _touch_  him. And this seems to amuse her more than anything, if the way she arches a brow is any indication. “That’s what she was calling him, anyway, when she was begging for her life.”

“You bitch,” he hisses.

It’s terrible that he can imagine it, imagine Rose gasping on the floor in Lyra’s rotting body, struggling to breathe through the decay flowering in lungs that aren’t hers, reaching a shaking hand out to the child she didn’t even want and who was born through violence but she loved and cherished anyway (and if that isn’t strength, then Ed doesn’t know what is). And all the while, Dante would just be smiling back at her with own face in a manner so serenely cruel it chilled you to the bone, her arms wrapped mock-lovingly around the child wailing for his mother’s comfort. His real mother, who writhed and twisted through convulsions before going eerily still.

Just the _thought_ fills Ed’s blood with a toxic fury.

“You’re far too harsh.” There’s no actual hurt in her tone, even as she sets a hand over her heart. She’s wearing a neckline that plunges decidedly low, openly displaying the stolen clavicle and stolen cleavage and all the stolen feminine beauty that isn’t hers to display in the first place. “I  _am_  the one who saved him, after all.”

“ _Saved_  him.” It’s such a ridiculous assertion that Ed can’t help but spit it back, feel the bitterness of the words bite his tongue.

“Why yes. I could have just left him to die, but instead I took him with us.” And then she places soft brown hands on his cheeks, cupping his face in some mockery of affection. It turns his stomach. “Wasn’t that kind of me?”

She leans in as though to kiss him, but he jerks away, nearly careening into the bassinette without his right arm to balance him. Luckily, he manages to catch the rail of the bassinette with his remaining hand before he can crash and flatten the child. Still, she’s too close, he’s boxed in.

“Don’t  _touch_  me.” She doesn’t even flinch when he snarls at her. Behind them, the baby has started to wail again. “You’re  _sick_. You—”

“I’m what, Edward?” All of a sudden, she is pressing against him, her breasts brushing his chest. Bile rises up in his throat as she starts walking brown fingers up the length of his remaining arm, nice and delicate and slow. “Not above killing a baby?”

He wants to throw up. He wants to throw up right in her face. See if she thinks she’s so high and mighty then. _You_ _killed my brother—_

But then her hand snatches his shoulder and he gasps because he can feel the blunt sharpness of her nails even through the cloth. Her eyes burn into his, swimming with a sort of dangerous cold, something that chills him right down to his blood. And then, leaning in, her breath warm against the shell of his ear as she whispers, “You’re right about that.”

“ _You_ —”

“I just thought you should know he was here,” she says as she releases him and pulls back. Whatever unnerving expression she wore is subsumed by her coolly gentle façade, a lovely brown face framed by primrose pink and soft eyes the color of twilight. “In case you decided to do anything... reckless.”

Breathing seems like a foreign endeavor, suddenly. She _planned_  this.

And only then does he realize—her perfume.

Air catches in his throat, and he’s left stumbling to regain his metaphorical balance. Because there’s no heavy floral fragrance shrouding her, thick enough to make him gag and fill the entire room with its potency. What she wears now is light and airy, just a spritz that shouldn’t be enough to hide the cloying stench of decay that _should_ be hitting him, overwhelming him with its rancid waves, but  _isn’t_.

“You... the rot—”

That earns him a chillingly sweet smile. “Oh, how _very_ astute.” She taps her (stolen) temple. “Think, Edward. The Stone can create any substance, can restore anything to its original state—isn’t that why you were looking for it in the  _first_  place?”

Immediately, Ed feels the pit drop from his stomach. The Philosopher’s Stone, the Red Tincture, the only thing in the world that can perform miracles. It can undergo any feat of the imagination—even defy the boundaries of reality, save only for time, but anything else can be manipulated to the lengths of any wild pleasure. It can turn lead into gold and water into wine and create flesh where there was none, fill vacuums and turn nothing into matter and even allow souls to leap from one vessel to another and survive the process. Very easily, one could use its power to create a whole human body from scratch, to transform a single tear into the vastness of an ocean, carve forests out of desert sand.

Of course it could knit up tears and return pieces and strengthen something on the verge of decay. A bitter laugh rises in his windpipe and gets caught there, vibrating within his throat, at the irony.

Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of souls—all poured into the restoration of one who has lived too long already.

She must see the revelation on his face, because her smile widens, all white teeth and frigid satisfaction. The light in her eyes makes his heart shudder in his chest. “I’ve such a _massive_  specimen. It’s been a good century or so since I’ve been able to...  _indulge_  myself so freely.”

The word “indulge”, the malicious twist she places upon its inflection, has his skin crawling. She reaches out as though to touch him again, but he jerks back before her— _Rose’s_ , stolen and pilfered by this  _parasite_ —fingertips can dare make contact. Whatever she thinks he is, he’s not some pet cat that’s going to curl up in her lap and let her pet him whenever she’s in a particularly villainous mood. If anything, he’s going to try clawing her eyes out the moment she gets too close, a snarl rumbling in his throat.

That has her pausing, something considering and calculative about her gaze. Slowly, she withdraws her hand, but she doesn’t look deterred. Instead, there’s a cold sort of excitement that flashes in her eyes.

“It’s a shame your father never thought of it,” she purrs as she turns away, all cream and honey. Brown hair spills down to her mid-back, coiffed and curled in a style that Rose could never afford, would never have the luxury of enjoying. The expensive silk of her dress whispers as she retreats. “Otherwise, he would be here instead of you.”

He is left to stand there as she disappears down the hall. He is left to stand there for a very, very long time.

All the while, the baby keeps crying.

* * *

He tries to find out how she’s slipping things into him, making him pliant and dreamily complacent for long stretches of time.

He grows selective of what he eats, avoiding anything that could be mixed or laced with sedatives, but that doesn’t work. When he forgoes eating entirely, he stills wakes with the distinct impression of more than just a night passing. Not drinking water doesn’t help, either. The only explanation he can think of is that she’s been injecting him with something while he’s sleeping, but when he strips and examines himself head-to-toe in the mirror for injection sites, he finds nothing.

It could be that it’s not just one thing that she’s using to drug him. She could be alternating, switching the pattern, maybe utilizing a combination of all three to keep him from finding out. Food when he refuses to drink water, water when he won’t eat, needles when he forgoes both of the above and then the haze lasts so long that whatever marks were there are already healed.

One day, he wanders into what looks like a darkroom lab, with the stink of chemicals indicative of developing fluids and light-sensitive paper. Old cameras make themselves at home on a row of shelves over counters lined with negative projectors. Empty film reels are placed in a rack nearby a freshly-polished sink.

A frown comes across his face as he ponders why this room, of all things, wouldn’t be locked. Maybe because she figures there’s nothing harmful in leaving this open to him.

As he starts to close the door behind him, he notices a folded note taped to the faucet. Frowning, he wanders over to tug it loose. It’s thick vellum, bleached white, folded in half. When he opens it, he finds a scrawl of sweetly flowing calligraphy.

_Give up, dear. You don’t find anything unless I want you to._

_All my love,_

_Dante_

Sitting in the sink is a small white syringe, the needle gleaming as though a taunting wink. It’s completely empty, but there’s a distinctively sweet smell about it that reminds Ed of the perfume Dante once used to mask the stench of decay. A heart has been drawn on its barrel in black lipstick.

Fucking  _bitch_.

With a snarl, Ed crumples the note in his fist. He can’t tear it into pieces without his other hand, so he settles for throwing it on the ground and stomping on it until he’s out of breath. Then he takes the syringe and throws it to ground, taking visceral satisfaction in hearing it clatter against the floor.

The snap of plastic beneath his steel heel is even better. But the stench of perfume lingers.

* * *

It takes a while, but he eventually figures out that Wrath is somewhere around here, held just as captive as Ed is.

It occurs to him that if Envy really is gone somewhere beyond the Gate, and with Gluttony transmuted into a refined Stone, then the only homunculus Dante would have left would be Wrath. And she doesn’t strike him as the type to waste her toys, even when they’re broken—not as long as she can make some use out of them.

(it disgusts him that he’s starting to understand how she thinks, if not anticipate her thoughts, because it means he’s spending enough time around her to know her and like _hell_  he wants to know how her mind works)

He starts searching the lower levels for secret wings. Prisons to hold inhuman monsters. It leads him to what appears to be a wine cellar, where a solid titanium trapdoor sits innocuously on the concrete floor. It seems the hinges are fused alchemically, and it cannot be opened unless he were able to clap and transmute it open. When he runs his remaining hand over the cool, smooth metal, he catches vibrations. Putting his ear to it earns him a faint hum, a distant vibration that would resonate either from a rumbling power generator or an alchemic prison. The fact that it’s sealed speaks to the latter.

Only inhuman strength or alchemy would grant him passage. He has none of the former, and is disabled immediately of the latter by the fact that only an empty sleeve to hang off his shoulder. But he is an alchemist, one-armed or no, and he is nothing if not adaptable. He smashes a bottle of wine loudly against the floor, then cuts his finger on an edge and traces a bloody array across the metal.

It’s crude, but it lights up beneath his fingertips anyway (familiar as an old friend, oh how he  _missed_  alchemy). The doors part beneath his influence.

_Take that, you old hag_ , he thinks as the darkness unfurls beneath him, descends into what appear to be granite steps. A deep breath steels his nerves before he descends with them.

Torches are mounted on the walls. He takes one for himself to chase the murk away with amber light. Eventually, the shadows give way to a diffuse bloody glow, one that peers from around the corner like a curious child. It shines with the same scarlet hue of the array that turned Liore into a Philosopher’s Stone, rising from the ground like gushing hellfire. It has the same brightness that shone from Gluttony’s belly like he swallowed a star, just before Dante pressed alchemy into his skin.

Swallowing, Ed peers cautiously around the wall.

Alchemy hums through the air, low and soft like a mother’s dreamy melody, but something about it echoes in an unnatural way that takes as much comfort as it gives. Shimmering scarlet lines carve their way across the floor and the walls and the ceiling of a small room in artistic swirls and curvatures. At first glance, it looks like the Grand Arcanum, but it’s fundamentally different, upon closer inspection. The space is painfully small, wrought of stone and concrete and giving off a slate-sharp darkness in addition to the electric ozone tang of transmutation. It gives the dreary impression that it could be lined with iron bars to better articulate a rigid sense of captivity, but the dark shape that slumps against the wall looks hopeless enough to make up for the lack thereof.

Wrath looks smaller than Ed remembers him, somehow. His head is bowed forward so that inky hair falls over his bone-white face, limbs curled up to his abdomen. It’s hard to tell if the burns he suffered from Sloth’s disintegration have healed, even if the patches in his hair have grown back—what hasn’t, though, are Ed’s stolen limbs, which Dante claims the Gate took back at her instruction. No new bone-white arm and leg have swelled to fill the absence, as though Wrath’s body doesn’t recognize that it’s supposed to have two arms and two legs and that there’s nothing wrong with the way it is now, so it won’t regenerate.

Seeing him like that, bereft of an arm and leg each, sends a bitter pang through Ed’s belly. Inhuman thief and freak of nature, sure, but it reminds Ed painfully of himself at eleven, dull-eyed and broken down and crushed under failure’s heel.

_You tried to bring her back too, and you failed too._

Ed shakes the thought off. No, that’s different. Completely different.

Cautiously, he steps forward, torch raised more for self-defense than for lighting. But Wrath doesn’t move. Doesn’t lift his head. Doesn’t twitch a muscle. Doesn’t even acknowledge Ed’s presence.

“It’s me,” Ed says. He’s not sure why.

Without even twitching, Wrath just continues to lay there, slumped and curled up like a shattered doll.

He moves closer. Firelight drips across the homunculus’s ivory face, and that is when Ed catches a glimpse of a half-lidded eye through the tangle of black hair. The pupils are blown and dilated, black nearly eclipsing violet, and they don’t shrink at the introduction of more light like they should. Glassy eyes, slack expression—Wrath looks as though he’s reduced to the corpse he’s always been.

It sends a shiver dancing up Ed’s spine.

Greed said that only the remains of the person they were supposed to be could trap a homunculus, could weaken and cripple them. When Teacher had told Ed that Wrath was actually made from his own remains, despair had been quick to grow heavy in his chest and he thought to himself this meant there was no way to disarm him. But perhaps that wasn’t true—perhaps Wrath is composed of his own weakness, and though it didn’t paralyze and debilitate him like the others, he’s still painfully vulnerable.

The longer Ed stares, the more his stomach turns and the more he finds himself tempted to cough bile onto the floor. It takes almost a minute, or at least some minute eternity, before he finally finds the strength to turn away and leave. He nearly trips three times climbing back up the stairs. His hand shakes when he returns to torch to its place. Nausea still churns in his stomach.

He knows, then. The unflinching certainty of it heavy settles in his belly, all sharp and hard angles. He needs to take Wrath with him.

Ed has no love for homunculi, and not for Wrath especially—but it leaves an awful taste in his mouth to just leave him here.

* * *

Next, Ed needs to locate the Stone. He hates everything it is, all the blood that has been poured into its creation, and just the thought of carrying such a thing with him makes him physically ill—but he’ll be damned if he lets Dante win by leaving it with her.

And it’s the only scrap he has left of Al, in some weird and roundabout way.

He spends the next few days of clarity (which could be months upon months apart, he doesn’t know, he can’t know, he tries not to think about it to avoid being consumed by horror) mapping out the mansion. Marking which doors Dante chooses to leave unlocked, because there’s no way it isn’t purposeful, and which she locks up tight. Records it all on a map of transmuted parchment that he takes great care to never hide in the same place twice.

Once he has a working map, he transmutes himself some chalk (easier to draw arrays in than blood) and starts alchemically unlocking doors. It ranges from bedrooms to giant walk-in closets, from libraries to coatrooms, a dining hall he didn’t know existed, a study that’s collecting dust from how little it’s been used. Janitor’s closets. Supply rooms. Parlors. A giant pantry that left him gaping because he didn’t even think a pantry could  _be this big_ , let alone that it should have its own separate room. A ballroom eerily and uncomfortably similar to the one from the underground city. Smaller, cramped quarters stationed on the first floor that must belong to the servants that he is now almost entirely certain exist, drifting in the forgotten corners of his drug-addled memories and sent away by Dante to further isolate him.

Isolate.

For a long time, Ed thought he understood what loneliness meant—that it was wrapping yourself up in obligation and pain and shutting out any attempts to break the barrier down. That it was being the only one in his own head, the only one with memory of the Gate or the guilt that pressed into his spine or the only one not allowed to enjoy himself because it isn’t fair, not when Al is suffering. He understood it to mean that even when you are surrounded by people who care for you, you are the odd one out, and you’ll only end up hurting them if you allow your presence to linger and stain their existence.

Now, though, he learns that loneliness is  _absence_. Is empty air when he turns over his shoulder to address a brother that isn’t there. Is seeing something and thinking that Winry would love it. Is endless, stretching hours of mindless silence and stillness that won’t go away. Is having so many thoughts and no one to pour them out to—not even having the option.

Sometimes it leaves him dizzy. Leaves him leaning against the wall with the sudden weight of the realization that there is  _no one here_. No one but that _hag_ and he’s _alone_ and there’s no one and everything’s spinning and he can’t breathe—

In, out.

_At least **you’re**  alive_, comes the sharp and nasally voice of guilt, familiar as a heartbeat.  _Alphonse doesn’t have that option._

Exactly. Get over yourself, Elric.

He finds a playroom, separate from the nursery where Dante keeps Rose’s son captive, that looks designed for an older child. All bright colors and toys decking the shelves and coloring books in a little bookcase. He finds himself simultaneously unnerved and relieved to find that nothing looks to have been touched.

(how long has it been now?)

Every new room he opens up ends up occupying his entire day. He all but tears it apart at the seams searching for the Stone—he narrowly shies away from punching holes in the plaster to search for hidden compartments, hidden safes, hidden rooms, hidden _anything_ —but ultimately comes away empty. After spending a few minutes panting angrily at the mess as his frenzy fades, he sets about putting it all meticulously back into place so she doesn’t find out. The last thing he wants is to tip her off, because Dante is a crafty bitch and secrecy is quickly turning into a luxury rather than a right and it’s certainly not a freedom anymore.

But she somehow knows (of course she knows, she always seems to) where he’s been and what he’s been doing, because the next time he finds that the door hasn’t been locked like it was before, now open to his perusing. As though to say,  _Wrong one, little boy. I have nothing to hide in here after all._

It’s very hard not to break things afterwards.

The only bright side to his failed searches is that he finds windows that aren’t covered, and is given a better view of his surroundings. Surroundings that are perpetually out of his reach in a kind of sweet torture he never knew existed.

A skylight in one of the libraries reveals a stunningly blue sky, the same sharp and vivid intensity that only comes about when summer reaches its zenith (too high to reach, even with a ladder).

Stumbling onto a conservatory leads to glass walls that expose a distant woodland that sits on the horizon, as dark and deep and lovely as the secret jungle on Yock Island (but no doors that lead outside, and the glass is too thick to shatter).

He finds a glass-enclosed balcony that overlooks rolling emerald fields almost exactly like Risembool’s and the jagged smudge of mountains rising the distance in a crown of hazy blue-grey-violet (even if he  _did_  break the glass, it’s a five-story drop that would definitely break his neck if he fell).

A solarium with open windows deposits a sharp gust of fresh air so clean and crisp that he finds himself _aching_ with longing, because he never realized he would miss the outside world so much (this entire mansion seems design to taunt him, to make him ache and yearn and realize what he’s lost, scrap by scrap).

So far, he’s yet to find a door that leads him outside, but it looks like the entire perimeter is choked by the impassive frown of a great stone wall that is three times as tall as Ed is, the thunderous grey color itself a condemnation against his escape plans. Whenever he catches a glimpse of it, he sticks his tongue out as a silent challenge to just try and stop him. Stone is nothing to an alchemist’s ability to change the world to their will.

Briefly, he considers searching for his arm, if only for the sake of convenience. But Dante has likely disposed of it by now, content with watching him wobble about in its absence. She’d probably love watching him tear the mansion apart in search of it, and then maybe detach his leg just to punish him for leaving something slightly out of place.

(some days he  _does_  wake up without his leg, and he howls in outrage—it always returns, though, like it’s all a game to her, seeing how frothing mad she can make him before starting from scratch again)

Besides, with the Stone in hand, he won’t even need it. No circles, no clapping, no nothing. Just raw alchemic power beneath his fingertips. Even _she_ won’t have the power to stop him.

Briefly, he also considers using the Stone to transmute a flesh arm, restore what he lost so long ago. If only because it’ll be difficult to carry so many with just the one. Maybe even restore his leg, too, while he’s at it, so she can’t toy with him anymore.

But then he thinks back to the lakeside that day, with Al’s fervent declaration to return Ed’s lost limbs to him, the way his soulfire eyes gleamed, and—

No, Ed will keep the prosthetics. Besides, he has no idea _which_ souls would end up sacrificed for something so selfish. And he can’t risk...

He dares not finish that thought.

* * *

“You’re not going to find it.”

Between them, a rich cream tablecloth spreads out, rippling like water as it pours off the edges of the oak dinner table in the extravagant dining hall. She must have ordered whatever cooks she employed to really put their best effort into concocting the beautiful-terrible display that spreads itself out in a symphony of mouth-watering smells. Fresh bread radiates steam from a wicker basket. Steamed vegetables are arranged by delectability, some sporting a pad of butter in order to better entice him, while others sit plainly seasoned, just the sight of them enough to draw hunger. Fresh fruit acts more as a garnish than an option from where it’s stuffed into a woven cornucopia, but it’s there nonetheless and ready to tempt if need be. An entire swan has been artfully arranged upon its platter, feathers returned to its roasted flesh so that it gives the impression that it’s still alive, still breathing, will spreads its wings and take flight at any minute. Laid out upon a bed of smoked banana leaves is some giant fish he’s never seen before, one that looks inexplicably tender even with the slate-grey scales that ripple along its body.

Candleflames gleam like orange stars set in a murky sky, the wax itself milky white and perched upon crystalline candlesticks. The lights are turned low in a way that even Ed can recognize as intending to be romantic. A nearby hearth is lit, offering a pleasant arrhythmic crackle to the atmosphere and sending amber warmth across its gold-gilt surface. Silver cutlery gleams atop maroon cloth napkins and next to gilt porcelain plates, the kind only busted out for a special event. Set up on either side of the table is a conveyer belt of some kind that renders the need for servers obsolete.

Bronze goblets have been set before each other them, filled to the brim with something dark and smelling vaguely of alcohol that he strongly suspects to be wine, but he dares not taste. A shallow bowl of cooling stew is set up in front of him.

It was the smell that brought him here. Her smile was sweet as she invited him to sit. Everything was planned the moment he stepped into the room, but he won’t give her the satisfaction of submitting. The only way he can win is by playing her game—that doesn’t mean, though, that he’ll play by her rules.

“Wherever you’ve hidden it, I’ll find it,” he retorts. He’s an alchemist and she’s an alchemist and they’re both clever and he’s not going to pretend he doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

There’s also no need to ask how she knows. He’s not entirely sure he wants to.

Dante doesn’t look up from buttering an inexplicably fluffy roll. “And how do you think you’re going to do that if you’re starving yourself?”

He sets his jaw and says nothing. It’s true that he’s been eating less out of caution, probably lost some weight—but like hell he’s going to admit that to her. Every little defeat counts against him.

Exhaling through her nostrils, she lowers her butter knife. Gold and jewels sparkle around her throat, drips from her wrists, dangle from her ears. She got Rose’s ears pierced. “Come now. Are you going to tell me you haven’t been eyeing the buffet for the last minute?”

What he was actually doing is trying figure out, based on what’s there, the location they’re in. What kind of cuisine this is. What’s available in this region. But it seems like she purposefully designed it so that he can’t tell. It’s all Amestrian food. Bitch.

“At least eat the stew. It’s lamb. That’s your favorite, isn’t it?”

Ed jerks hard. “How do you—”

“You told me.” She says it simply, then takes a bite.

Slow horror starts to creep up, followed swiftly by a sharp surge of anger. “ _That’s_  why you’ve been drugging me.”

Delicately, she swallows. Her lips are painted deep maroon. “Not explicitly, but I  _do_  find you less stubborn in that state.”

A snarl leaves him, and he slams his fist against the table. The cutlery rattles. The candlesticks waver. The goblet sloshes, but nothing spills.

Cool amusement suffuses across her features. There’s something on her face that makes the skin soft and dewy, and a touch of rogue beneath the cheekbones. “Temper, temper.”

“Where’s my arm?” He knows he concluded that she probably scrapped it, but the more he thinks about it, the more convinced he becomes that she’s probably hidden it somewhere, just to mock him.

Blinking once, innocently, she tilts her head to one side. Rose’s dark hair has been pulled up in an elaborate updo, held together by hairpins that glitter in the hearth’s light, but he can’t determine their color. “Eat, and I might tell you.”

Scowling, his gaze dips down to the stew. The steam that radiated from it in sinuous curls has petered out. Thick and brown, the chunks of meat bobbing delectably among small green peas and thick potato wedges and cooked carrot slices. The sight alone has him aching in nostalgia—the smell sends him careening back to his childhood in Risembool, with Mom’s amused smile at the dinner table as he and Al argue over who deserves seconds.

“It’s not poisoned.” Dante leans back. Today, she’s chosen to be a spectacle in a warm, rippling amber that beautifully compliments the warm undertones of her terracotta complexion. It looks almost like she’s draping herself in the last rays of a sunset, stealing the light away for the sole purpose of looking resplendent and then leaving the world to grapple with darkness—it’d be just like her, too. “Or drugged. I much prefer you when you’re fully awake.”

Grudgingly, he reaches for his spoon and allows earthy brown broth to fill the concave of silver. A taste confirms that, while it does look and smell similar, the taste isn’t quite right. Which is fine—the last thing he wants is to get subsumed by childhood memories.

“Well?” she prompts. Her hands are webbed beneath her chin, as though in anticipation. “How is it?”

Ignoring her, he drops the spoon into the bowl. “Why am I here?”

“Why not?” She reaches for her goblet, then takes a sip.

“Don’t fuck with me,” he spits, but she doesn’t look perturbed, only continues to sip her drink leisurely. He thought he knew hatred before, but what roils deep in his belly is something entirely different than what he thought he knew—like loneliness, there is a whole other layer to the emotion, an entire dimension of resentment and loathing he was better off never knowing the existence of. “You didn’t need to take me. It was an unnecessary risk. You  _knew_  that. You could have gotten away fine on your own, but you chose not to. Why?”

“Why are you looking for the Stone?” is her counter. She eyes him over the rim of her cup, all cold twilight and hard amethyst. “You could leave without it.”

“I’m not leaving him here with you.”

“Him,” she repeats, eyes flashing.

Shit.

“It,” he moves to correct, but it’s already too late. He’s shown his hand.

“Your brother.” With practiced elegance, she sets the goblet back down so that it doesn’t spill over. There’s a self-satisfied curl to her maroon lips. “What, do you think you can rescue Alphonse’s soul from the Stone?”

Ed says nothing.

In his head, it sounds stupid. Out loud, it sounds crazy. Sounds like the smoke exhaled from the desperate pipedream of a child too young to know better.

He’s not sure if it’s grief, or denial, or even desperation. Or, hell, maybe Tucker was onto something when he said Ed was the sort of person who needed to push boundaries and draw his own lines between impossibility and probability. Maybe he’s just a blind fool who lost his mother at ten and his brother at sixteen and even knowing what the homunculi are, what he damned Sloth to, he doesn’t know how to let go.

Anyone who knows anything about him knows he’s the last person to accept the world for the way it is, much less bow his head gracefully in defeat. He grips onto scraps of defiant fantasy so tight that it needs to be torn bloody from his clawing hands.

He’ll probably kill himself in the process.

Knowing that doesn’t seem to be enough to stop him, though.

Perhaps Dante sees this, and this is why her lip curls to reveal a flash of white teeth. It’s almost a gesture of triumph, really. She’s centuries old, a vile creature who has survived on the back of the human condition and observed it from her (imagined) perch above them. Perhaps she’s seen countless other desperate little boys like him who have lost too much and gotten too little back and maybe that’s where her belief in Equivalent Exchange began to decay—or maybe she’s just laughing at him, because he’s stupid and selfish and can’t seem to overcome his own weaknesses.

The only reason he even knows that loneliness is, what isolation is, is because she’s trapped him in these gilded halls and played with his mind and stole his brother from him.

None of this would have happened if not for her.

She raises her cup to her lips for another swallow of wine. “Oh, you poor noble fool. It would be easier for you to just make a whole new brother from scratch.”

Black rage roils through his being, tumbles wild and heedless through his chest. “The only reason Al is dead is because of  _you_.”

From her smirk, it’s clear that she was hoping he would bring this up. “You’re the one who went to Liore, Edward.”

The reminder stings like a slap in the face. Yes, he and Al were the ones who first dethroned Cornello and plunged the city into riotous chaos. Then the military came, then people died—then they came back and all those soldiers, no matter how vile they were (and he doesn’t doubt that there must have been some good ones, mixed in there, caught up in everything), also perished in the dusty streets.

He still remembers the rows of graves that Scar showed him, of the people who would be alive right now if not for his intervention.

But Cornello would still have raised the city into a rebellion, would have twisted those people into storming Central and maybe thousands more would have fallen before he was satisfied. All because they believed in miracles performed by a false Philosopher’s Stone.

Which also came from her.

“You manipulated everything from the start,” he spits back. Not just Liore—Ishval, too, was all an elaborate ploy of hers to grasp the Stone in her gnarled, rotting hands. And all those people were just collateral damage to her immense, ugly greed.

This doesn’t even have her batting an eye. If she was still wearing Lyra’s face, he would have compared her to a marble statue, timeless and impassive and deserving of being smashed into pieces. “And yet, you danced perfectly to my tune.”

Again comes that jagged ripple of loathing, accompanying with it a revulsion that shudders through his skeleton. No matter the container, the package is the same. If he looks closely, he can see past Rose’s lovely features, see the twisted soul that has taken residence there.

Deep down, she’s a creature of monstrous decay, a parasite clinging desperately for a foothold in a world that has already moved beyond her. So instead, she retaliates by dragging it down with her. She’s a twisted idol painted over in false charm and youth that isn’t hers in an attempt to hide her true nature. She’s just a beautiful monstrosity bound up in gleaming jewels and twisted philosophies. She can argue about the negative value of things, disparage humanity until time crumbles Amestris into dust on the parchment of old maps, can rip Equivalent Exchange apart at all angles—it’s just a deflection. It won’t change what she is.

“This doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?” Ed has to say it slowly to keep from screaming. He wonders if she can see the way he’s gripping the armrest of his chair to contain himself, nails sinking into the wood. She probably can. “You don’t even give a shit that you’ve killed _literal thousands_.”

“ _I_  didn’t kill anyone.”

“You’re still  _responsible_. Their deaths are on _your_ hands.”

“Oh, poor me,” she drawls, blinking only once. “How shall I go on.”

“ _Fuck_  you.” It’s all he can do not to reach for a particularly sharp knife and stab her with it. Maybe she can transmute at a faster pace than he can, with him down an arm, but he knows how to kill now—Greed taught him how to destroy monsters.

Casually, she reaches out for her goblet again. “Throwing a tantrum won’t change anything.”

Okay. That tears it.

“I’m getting them out of here,” he snaps at her. She’s a being of manipulations and extravagant plans and he refuses to play by her rules any longer. “Wrath and Rose’s son, Lios. I’m taking them with me. And we’ll go somewhere you’ll  _never_  find us—if I don’t fucking kill you first.”

To his surprise, and annoyance, a white smile sears across her face. She conceals it into her cup, but a wintry mirth continues to dance in her eyes, a silent but heady fit of laughter. “Is that right?”

Bitch. She’s  _trying_  to rile him up. “ _Yes_.”

This time she does laugh, light and chiming like a crystal bell. “And all this is easier than just bringing your brother back.”

His snarl answers her.

“I’m just saying, Edward.” She warps her tone into something sweet, dripping with concern that is so obviously false that it’s all he can do not to gag. “In my hundreds of years, I have seen people find comfort in homunculi—however brief.”

She sips daintily. He wants to smash the goblet over her head and watch the spilled wine ruin her pretty dress. “Is that why you kept Envy around?”

It was just a jab he made unthinkingly, blind in his outrage at the implication that Al could ever be replaced, and by an inhuman monster at that—but her pause with the cup to her lips tells him he’s struck something raw and tender. Her jaw clenches once, her eyes narrow subtly but dangerously, her apathetic mask briefly overcome with a black rage that she is quick to hide.

But it’s too late—she’s already shown her hand.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” A wicked giddiness fills him at having found a weakness, a chink in her otherwise impenetrable armor. _Not so above it after all, are you?_  “He’s not  _actually_ your son, but he was the closest thing you had, and you—”

“Couldn’t kill him like you killed Sloth?” she interrupts saccharinely.

And now he’s the one clenching his jaw. Damn her.

Unbidden, he’s thrust back to the moment where Sloth’s body turned sickly green as it began to dissolve into ethanol—her swaying hair, her translucent face, the nostalgic tenderness in her eyes. Her parting words. The sharp odor that lingered long after she’d lost solid form. The guilt at having Al watch him destroy something that bore their mother’s image, even if it wasn’t actually her.

And it wasn’t.

It  _wasn’t_.

The mouthful of broth suddenly threatens to come back up.

She makes an effort at looking contrite. He makes an effort at willing her to choke. He’s lost the upper hand as quickly as he gained it. “She was your mother, Edward.”

“No,” he retorts, his gaze flashing down to the sharpest silverware at his disposal in case her jugular starts screaming for something sharp to pierce it, “she wasn’t.”

Something like pity, almost, takes residence in her gaze. Not that such a creature is capable of pity. “You made her to replace your mother, though.”

A protest rises in Ed’s throat, but he can’t be sure if it isn’t laced with bile and the urge to retch. Because... she’s not wrong.

It’s one thing to do what Teacher did, coax life back into the breast of a corpse and return what was lost. It’s another thing entirely to start from scratch. It’s another thing entirely to create blueprints for the person you’re supposed to love more than the world itself, but instead you reduce them to a framework and a skeleton and an empty vessel to be filled at your leisure.

He looks down at the stew, at the rich brownness that is so much like Mom’s it hurts. His reflection hovers in the broth, half-obscured by meat and potatoes and carrots and peas and all the other things his younger self missed desperately enough to wage war against nature’s law. It’s not the real thing. A replica, made for the sole purpose of breaking him down to the child he hasn’t been in so long. An attempt to remake an original, when the original is supposed to stand on its own.

Alchemy is all about deconstruction and reconstruction, but what he and Al tried to do was entirely a matter of reconstruction without even pausing to question if people should be as easy to transmute from a washbasin of raw elements as a metal toy from tin scraps. Teacher’s actions, though no less a perversion of the natural order, were ultimately more noble. She tried to resuscitate. They treated it like making a replacement, trial and error until they could make a perfect duplicate.

People don’t work like that. A soul isn’t something to be created so callously.

“I was wrong,” he says. Eleven and wrong, so wrong, so very wrong and still paying for it every single day after the fact. “You can’t replace people. You can’t replace _family_.”

For a long moment, silence schools her features into something he can’t quite read, almost-but-not-quite-thoughtful. Her violet gaze scans his face in soft, fleeting flickers like shadows darting over his features. He’s not sure what she sees, but her expression smooths out into a stoic mask that he would have to fracture into thousands of pieces just to guess at what thoughts bubble under the surface.

“No,” Dante says, drawing back, and he looks up in alarm because there’s no way in hell she’s actually fucking  _agreeing_  with him. “I suppose you’re right.”

A long silence follows. When he gets up to leave, she makes no move to stop him.

* * *

She starts drugging him at night.

With increasing frequency, he wakes in the mornings to unfamiliar walls, finding himself clutched with a high and cutting hope that he’s somewhere else, that it was all a nightmare, that’s he’s back in Risembool or East City or in Central or even in one of the sleeper cars of a train—

Until he realizes he’s half-dressed. There are bruises on the side of his throat and teethmarks on his skin. Rope burns around his wrist, a strange and sensitive stain in his muscles. The sheets are tangled. The curtains are drawn. As he sits up, he realizes her perfume hangs stale in the air.

It’s all over him.

His stomach drops to his toes.

No.

It comes back in hazy flashes—in cloyingly sweet murmurs, in the smudged imprint of fingertips, in the taste of her in his mouth, in his hips spiking up against his will, in sounds his voice should never contort into.

_No_.

He finds a bathroom and heaves his stomach contents into the toilet until his throat burns like he swallowed hot glass shards. He heaves and heaves and heaves until there’s nothing left, not even bile to force out, but he keeps heaving and heaving and heaving and he can barely breathe.

He’s not even sure he wants to, after this.

The first time, he found a shower and turned it on scalding hot and let his skin grow raw and red and aching beneath the burn of it. He’d hoped the pain would chase out the memory, but it only grew sharper and clearer as nightmares are wont to do. When he tried to scrub it away, this crawling sensation that transformed into a plaguing itch (and still haunts him at odd hours, leaves his eyes aching), it only seemed to sink deeper until he couldn’t reach it. And then he was left struggling to think straight over the horror and utter _revulsion_ that curdled deep in some pocket of his insides—like a rotted hand stuck itself into his belly, played around with his innards, then withdrew after one of its fingers broke off and stayed there, nestled somewhere in the knots of his intestines.

His knees gave out abruptly and his forehead came to rest against the wall as the heat battered his spine. The thought of looking at himself made him sick. He _felt_ sick. He felt like he was the one who should be rotting, decay spreading slowly over every inch of him until his body would finally give out to decomposition, and they would find him here laying in a pool of hot water and sludge. At the time, it seemed infinitely more favorable than standing up.

Very suddenly, Ed understood why Rose had gone mute. Maybe she just screamed her lungs raw until her throat gave out on her, bloody and torn. He’d been sicker than he’d ever been when Scar told him what happened but he didn’t even know, didn’t understand, oh  _god_ —

Only then did he realize he was crying.

The second time, he scrubs so hard that blood starts to well up around his ports, where skin meets steel.

The third, he earns bruises on his knuckles from punching the wall again and again and again in hopes that the pain will blot it out.

The fourth, he just sits on the floor of the shower, huddled beneath the spray of hot water and steam and trying desperately to breathe, like he’s forgotten how.

The fifth, he looks into the mirror and sees someone he doesn’t even recognize staring back at him with fractured eyes.

The sixth, he just gives up and cries.

He loses track after that.

_You’re breaking my heart, Edward. Talking to me this way._

While the revolting knowledge of violation is never quite as sharp and keen and painful as the first time, it doesn’t get any less potent. It clings to him like a filth he can’t erase. It sinks into his bones and stays there, wrought into his very veins. There’s no being rid of it.

And twisted as it sounds, he almost becomes glad Al is gone—if only so he can’t see him like this.

_I was looking forward to taking her body and being loved by the son of Hohenheim._

The days where he wakes up without the need to vomit and scrub himself raw dwindle rapidly.

* * *

Ed’s days of clarity grow increasingly frequent. It puts him off more than reassures him, because he knows she’s trying to lure him into a false sense of security, and he’ll be damned if he lets her.

Desperation swells inside him, thrashing in his ribcage like a living thing demanding release, and she seems to know it. Nowadays, he almost never sees her, as though she’s just abandoned her desire to torture him on his clear-headed moments. There are no random notes left laying around or taunts waiting for him around the corner. She never shows herself to have a sardonic debate about the merits of Equivalent Exchange, or sweetly remind him that Al is dead, or even imply that she’s aware of his every movement.

He’d almost say she’s replacing it with the drugged nights and the torturous mornings after—but those, too, start to inexplicably dwindle.

Instead, her cruel influence bleeds into the very mansion. It changes around him, propelled by some inexplicable shift he can’t name, isn’t even sure he wants to.

Doors that weren’t locked before now are. The wallpaper of certain hallways has had their patterns or colors changed to a softer, brighter combination. Curtains are drawn back to reveal the outside. Rugs crop up where there used to be hardwood. The playroom Ed stumbled upon by accident is almost perpetually ajar, no matter how many times he closes it. There’s a chandelier in the ballroom that wasn’t there before and now glitters in crystal shards. Empty picture frames are hung up on the wall, almost like some kind of eerie promise.

Trays of freshly-baked sweets are left to cool in the kitchen. Rose’s son is no longer in the nursery, and Ed can’t find him no matter how many rooms he looks through. Vases of flowers are set up in the conservatory in some strange attempt at house making. He catches the rattle of windchimes somewhere outside his room.

Every three days, he’ll find an antique gramophone left on in the parlor, belching out some soothing classical composition from its brassy bell-shaped loudspeaker. Books are left out in the library, all of which Ed pointedly refuses to acknowledge, but a precursory glance of one revealed it to be a text on human biology.

It all seems to be an elaborate scheme to unnerve him.

The worst part is that it’s working.

Slowly but surely, the mansion is becoming unrecognizable. He acknowledges how helplessly lost he would be if not for the map he’d drawn up early on, and it’s not like a whole new room can be added suddenly and instantaneously. Still, it pricks at some deep-seated unease that he refuses to acknowledge, has him hunching his shoulders and holding his breath and his heart beating unexpectedly loud.

He transmutes the lock off another door. The hinges groan a protest as he opens it, but they don’t resist.

It’s a study, but not in the same sense as the one he uncovered earlier. There’s no dust on the thick volumes of the bookshelves, or the curls of parchment stacked nearly on the credenza. The lingering smell of burnt kerosene speaks to the lantern sitting on the credenza having been recently used to pull an all-nighter. A long wooden desk on the far end of the room acts as a home to various glass shapes. Capped flasks linked to one another by long, winding plastic wires, a rack of vials brimming with colorful serums, a series of jars occupied by powdered contents. There’s a sink off to the side that’s faintly pitted as evidence of exposure to caustic or erosive chemicals, and on its countertop sits more equipment that Ed is sharply familiar with.

A Bunsen burner attached to the table by a rubber cord. Unwashed beakers. Test tube racks complete with dirty occupants. Smudged crucibles doubling as a holding palace for two thermometers and a recently-polished scoopula. A funnel with a half-melted exit laid flat on its wide top. Forceps and tongs paired off to the side, gleaming silver in the lowlight. A long buret mixed among pipettes and droppers. A smudged watch glass.

All at once, he understands.

An alchemy lab.

_Dante’s_  lab.

His heart quickens. After some rooting around, he finds an ornamental jewelry box tucked in one of the credenza drawers, in the last place it should be. The lock is sealed tight, but he only needs to brush his fingers over the surface of the polished wood to feel the thrum of alchemy that radiates within the capsule. He calls upon it like a nostalgic tang, like a memory that nearly slipped away, like a childhood pleasure you thought you’d forgotten.

With a red snap, the lock comes undone.

All at once, the lid throws itself back. Scarlet-white radiance sears into his vision, leaving him to gasp and blink and struggle to regain his sight through the blinding phosphenes that dance across his corneas.

Once his eyes clear, he gets a better look at it. The initial flare of brilliance seemed to have been a lash of protest at having been contained for so long, but freedom has eased its temperament and left it to smolder into a low, ethereal lambent. At first glance, it seems almost like a calcification of solid light, a physical structure composed almost entirely of captured radiance given a corporeal form. Sharp, uneven facets give it an almost jagged appearance, like a crimson-white star that fell loose from the heavens and fractured from its rough landing on the earth, fragments sloughing off from it as it sat in a smoking, blackened crater. Looking at it directly leaves him blinking spots from his eyes.

Something in him wavers, a shudder going through his lungs—then his knees buckle, hitting the pitted hardwood with a dull  _thunk_  of steel and bone respectively. His eyes sting. Relief rolls through him in thick, smashing waves against the rocky shore of the helplessness he found himself stranded on for so long that he forgot what it was to have hope sear through his being.

He found it.

It’s here. He did it. This is—this is the key to freedom. He’s going to set Wrath free and grab Lios and get the _fuck_ out of here. He’s going to run through the forests and scale mountains and cross as many oceans as he has to, just put as much distance between himself and this hellhole as he can. He’s going to let himself drown in the embrace of the sky and the fields and the tickle of grass on his cheeks, just lie there until the sun carves itself into his skin.

Once he gets to Central, he’ll go up to Mustang and punch him in the face and then congratulate him for sticking it to Bradley. He’ll go to Dublith in search of Teacher, hug her tight and demand to know how the fuck she stood training under this hell-bitch. He’ll return to Risembool in a triumphant glory of golden sunshine and summer grasses, to the smell of Granny’s cooking and Winry’s smile and collapse in a bed where his body hasn’t been taken from him. He’ll get his arm back and won’t be tottering around in this state of half-balance and he’ll be able to run into the distance that has been taunting him for so long.

He’s  _free_.

When he raises his eyes again, its irradiance sears into him. He’s struck again by the way his throat ached as he screamed, his wrist bruising beneath Envy’s harsh grip, Al’s sobbing before Gluttony’s teeth sank into the blood-seal. The crackle of alchemy as Dante transmuted her own homunculus into the thing that sits before him now.

Slowly, he finds the strength to rise back up to his feet. It’s a massive chunk of effulgence, carved from thousands upon thousands of lives that should never have been cut short, distilled from people who never had anything to do with alchemy itself and were completely innocent until they were drawn into a massive array that dissolved them whole. If he closes his eyes, he can still see the way Liore was swallowed up by that unearthly crimson shine, as thought the doors of hell parted just to accept the sacrifice that had been offered to it. He’d need to cup the Stone in both hands just to carry it properly, the enormity of its mass swelling beyond the limits of just one palm. The weight of all those souls—it must not be an easy thing to carry around, bulky and heavy and awkward as carrying a corpse over your shoulder.

And somewhere, in there...

Shakily, he raises his hand to touch the Stone’s surface. An obscene warmth festers beneath these gleamingly radiant facets, almost like he can feel the twitching and writhing of all the souls trapped within it.

Fleetingly, wildly, he wonders if they’re still alive in there, still aware. If they’re screaming in the depths of their misery, struggling to recall their names and their selves and their individuality amidst the dormant torrent of alchemic potential. If they’re still people, somehow, even like this.

Al was human, even in that metal shell. A soul isolated from its proper body, and he was still alive. So maybe—

God, it sounds crazy. It sounds fucking _insane_.

Ed wishes he could help himself.

“It’s okay, Al.” A sob swells in the breakage of his throat. He swallows it back down. “I’m here. It’s okay.”

“I already told you, didn’t I?” An electric chill lances down his spine. Faint perfume drifts from behind him, has a retch rising hotly in his throat. “There’s no way to save your brother’s soul, Edward. It’s part of the Stone. You  _can’t_  separate them.”

Unceremoniously, he’s thrust back into his twelve-year-old self, his pocket watch freshly gleaming from his beltloop as he stands in a shadow-ridden laboratory before a warped creature that should have never been. He remembers Tucker’s wild eyes as he proclaimed that this is the way science advances. Remembers pressing his palms together in order to split the two foreign elements apart, only to freeze as he remembered the gnarled thing they made in the basement a year before that. And Tucker crowed, almost victorious,  _It’s a perfect fusion, right down to the soul._

It was satisfying beyond on imagination, the impact made by the crown of steel knuckles against Tucker’s cheekbone. The sound, the way it reverberated up his forearm. Delicious savagery.

Then blood arced in copper-scarlet splatters across the concrete wall of a back alley, and he clapped his hands desperately even as his gloves turned from white to red and the rain drenched him to the bone.

It’s been so long since he felt rain on his face. Felt sun, felt wind, felt the ripple of forest shadows across his back. It’s been so long since he’s been able to wake up in the morning without knowing, inexorably, that he’s a prisoner in a gilded cage. He’s almost forgotten how laughter feels like in his throat, how a smile feels on his face, the sound of voices other than  _hers_.

What it feels like to not wake up sick to his stomach, afterimages of her hands on his skin, vomiting in the toilet and then scrubbing himself raw in a scalding shower.

The lid slams closed beneath his hand. “Watch me.”

Tutting, like a mother to her child. “You’ll kill yourself, foolish boy.”

“Maybe—but I’ll kill  _you_ , first,” he snarls, turning—

And stops.

...no.

“Really?” She tilts her head innocently to one side, but her face isn’t what holds his attention. “You’d kill me like _this_?”

With the grace of angel, or some holy woman that whispers with divinity and ripples with elegance unmatched by mortals, she steps forwards. She’s even chosen to adorn herself in unearthly white, the color of purity. Highlighted against the backlight of the hallway, she almost seems draped in a sublime halo, a mark of holiness and sanctity. The skirt gives silken whispers as it swishes loosely around her legs, but it hugs tight at the curvature of her torso.

His knees quiver. He’s imaging it. It’s a trick of the light. It can’t be.  _It can’t be_.

Wrapped loosely around her bare shoulders and unclothed arms is a gauzy shawl that seemingly drapes her in sparkling smoke. There is no vulnerability in the way she pulls it tighter around herself. Her smirk is triumphant. “My. You’re despicable.”

Bile surges up his throat only to get stuck there, trapped in the space between his mouth and his gullet. His stomach hits his toes with a reverberating impact. He swallows and tries not to think about the imprint of her lips against his throat and chest but the white flash of her teeth sends a sharp bolt of helplessness through his nerves.

The mornings of waking up violated and disgusted, of knowing she had touched him without consent. They’d tapered off, suddenly and without explanation. But now—

Horror melts into him, eats his bones like acid. This has to be a mistake. It  _has_  to be.

“What’s with that face?” Her voice sends the itch, which plagues him in vivid aches at odd hours, flowering across his flesh. He’s struck with the sudden urge to run, to hide, to find a cramped corner far from her searing eyes and cower until nightfall. “Most new fathers are more excited.”

And then the world gives out beneath him. His trembling hand retracts from the jewelry box—just as his knees lose their structural integrity. Only instinct has him thrusting his arm out to catch him before he smashes into the floorboards.

Her torso hovers over him like a phantom. The swell in her abdomen is not overly pronounced, but enough so that the confirmation catches onto his ribs like a vice and chokes the air from his lungs and this  _can’t be happening_. This is a horrible dream, a nightmare, a terrible fear he never knew existed given shape by his shitty subconscious because it loves to torture him.

_Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake—_

Floorboards creak beneath her slow, approaching steps. He hangs his head, struggling for breath against the pressure building in his chest. It feels like the ground is swaying beneath him, like any moment it’s going to collapse and he’ll spend the rest of eternity drowning in the void. And he thought he knew what fear was, thought he knew despair, but he was _wrong_.

She stops in front of him. Towers over him, immaculate and larger than life and her perfume gets caught in the back of his throat. “Look at me, Edward.”

“No.”

It comes out brittle. It comes out as a plea. It comes out like he’s begging on his knees before a broken altar. His pulse roars through him, pounds against the walls of his body like a prisoner protesting their sentence and demanding release, like it’s going to break him open from the inside out.

“Are you  _really_  so surprised?” The veil of his bangs obscures her from his vision, but her chiding tone has a shudder erupting all over his skeleton, has his stomach twisting into hard, heavy knots. “After all the nights we spent together—”

“ _No_.”

The last time he trembled like this was when he was eleven and sprawled out bloodily across the basement floor in the wake of the monstrosity he and his brother cooked up in place of their mother. That braid of helplessness and horror from then pales in comparison to what sears through him now. There’s vomit in his throat that won’t come out and denial clings firmly to him like a comfort and suddenly the faintest brush of clothing against his skin leaves him wanting to writhe free of himself.

Shaking, shuddering, falling apart piece by piece, he leans back so that he’s not straining his weight on his arm. Tangles his fingers in his hair. Tugs hard because you’re not supposed to feel pain in a dream—but a sharp, shooting fire bolts down from his scalp and it has a hot sting pricking behind his eyes and yet he still isn’t waking up and it  _can’t be true_.

“And here I thought you would be happy.” There’s fake hurt in her voice, like rubbing alcohol on a bee-sting. She eclipses him in her shadow.

Something like a whimper breaks in his throat. It sounds pathetic. “... _please_.”

“Now, Edward,” she says in a chiding tone, and he actually does gag this time but the bile still won’t come. “Were you planning on running off with the Stone, just leaving me like this?”

_Wake up. Please. Please, please, fucking **wake up** —_

Slowly, she lowers herself to her knees. He can’t look up, can’t look at her face, can’t can’t can’t—

He nearly flinches when her fingertips graze his cheekbone. “And here I was thinking you weren’t like your father.”

Oh,  _fuck_.

Of  _course_  she knows. Of fucking  _course_  she would know all the intimate pains of his childhood. About the conspicuous absence that plagued their household, the way Mom smiled away her sadness even as she kept looking out the window like she was lost in a dream. About how he grappled with a reality where his own father didn’t  _want_  him, didn’t care enough to _stay_.

_If I ever become a father, I’ll **never**  do what he did_, had been something he decided for himself so long ago he’d almost forgotten, because it came from a time when a normal life in the countryside hadn’t yet been torn apart and it still seemed a possibility to him. Even now, that resolve somehow lingered in him, half-awake and not entirely shattered in spite of everything.

Of  _course_  she would have drugged it out of him. Subdued the rebellion in him, learned it and who knows what else when his mind was fogged and his lips were loose and he was too pliant to let his jadedness stand in the way of the truth.

And now here she is, taking the fractures of his misery and his pain and throwing it back in his face. Taking the barbed armor he wrapped himself in for his own protection and picking it apart, piece by piece, and then sharpening the steel plating into a polished blade that pierces right down to the very core of him.

Fuck.

Her hands under his chin makes him jerk back, but her grip is deceptively firm and he tried pull away but he ends up freezing because then she’s tilting his face up to look at her. The false softness of her violet eyes is too harsh a mimicry of Rose, her smile too much like Mom’s, and it adds a new breakage spearing through his chest.

“But you aren’t, are you? No,  _I_  think you’re going to do the right thing.” Still smiling, she brushes hair from his face in a gesture of mock affection. He wants to scream. “Such a noble fool.”

It hits him, with all the force of a hammer into a stubborn nail, that this was her plan all along. Ever since he woke up here, she’s been plotting and scheming and weaving this web that’s tangled him before he even realized he was caught at all.

The pieces start connecting. The brighter-colored wallpaper. The little shifts in the mansion to make it nicer. The opened windows to tease him. The newly-locked doors to taunt him. The books in the library on  _reproductive_   _biology_. The gramophone that played fucking  _lullabies_ , how did he  _miss_  that? The playroom that’s perpetually open but _as of yet_ untouched—

Everything was right there, if only he’d taken the time to put the pieces together. It was all there, it was right fucking  _there_ , the  _whole goddamn time_ —

He hangs his head, can’t breathe. “Oh  _god_.”

Drugs have nothing to do with his pliancy when she pulls him closer. It makes him itch and choke on a retch but she doesn’t seem to mind, just levels his forehead against the curve of her shoulder and he can’t find it in him to jerk away. “Say,” she croons from above him, “I was thinking. If it’s a boy, perhaps we could name him Maes, after your military friend. The one who died? You remember him, right?”

Helplessness threatens to split him open, crack him right down the middle. Ed squeezes his eyes shut. This _can’t be happening_.

“And if it’s a girl, hm... my first thought was Rose—but the more I think about it, the more I like Trisha.” She starts to card her hands through his hair in some mockery of affection and he wants to scream, wants to tear her to pieces and them himself but he can’t even find the strength to breathe right now, let along utter a coherent sound or move. “Or—what was the name of that little girl whose family you stayed with? The one who got turned into a chimera?”

That has him jerking, but she holds firm.  _How does she_ —

“Oh,  _that’s_  right.” She snaps stolen fingers together, her smile mockingly bright. “ _Nina_. I  _like_  that name.”

Something suspiciously like a sob leaves him. He doesn’t need to know how she knows—if it was Bradley or if the other homunculi were stalking him, or maybe his drugged self knowing no secrecy. It doesn’t matter. She’s won and he raises a trembling hand to his mouth and it’s all he can do to keep his stomach contents where they belong.

But she isn’t done there. She leans in, her breath warm and damp against the shell of his ear, her perfume overpowering as she whispers, “Although, if it’s a boy we _could_ name him Alphonse instead. Wouldn’t that be much better than a homunculus?”

Of course. Of fucking  _course_.

Something like triumph shines in her eyes as she seizes his remaining hand and slowly guides it to the swell of her womb. It’s firm beneath his palm, and he imagines feeling the life within it quickening. “Oh, there are _so many choices_. How  _ever_  will we decide?”

That’s it. That—a tidal wave of nausea swamps him and he can’t hold it back anymore, can’t  _take_  it anymore. He shoves her aside, blind with the burning his throat and scrambles off to the sink at the far end of the room out of reflex. There’s a sickening splat against the pitted steel as he  _heaves_ , and the sickness comes spilling out like pus from an infection. His throat burns from the bile and his eyes sting with hot tears that roll down his cheeks and he heaves and he heaves and he heaves until there’s nothing left to come out and then he heaves a little more just for good measure.

When he’s done, he’s trembling and gasping and sobbing and blinking down at the smelly brown-green-yellow puddle slowly inching towards the drain.

_Every time_  he thinks he understands what true helplessness is, the universe proves him _spectacularly_ wrong. From the failed transmutation to Nina to the Chopper—to Scar and Greed and Liore and Hughes dying and Sloth and  _losing Al_ —

And  _now_ —

This has to be bedrock. It  _has_  to be. It  _can’t_  get any worse than  _this_.

“Feeling better?” He didn’t hear her move, didn’t hear her rise to her feet or cross the distance and settle behind him, but he hears her voice and there’s no concern it—it’s just another taunt. Just another stab at his weakness.

From the very  _moment_  he got here, he had  _nothing_. But she, in her calculated cruelty, wouldn’t let him know that until she little by little stripped layer after layer away from him, pulling the rug out from under his feet so fast he didn’t even register its absence. First she took away the world, then human contact, his mind was hers to remove and return at her leisure, his body taken for her pleasure—

This is the last of it. This is all he has left, and it’s ashes.

“I hate you,” he rasps out brokenly, and he’s never meant it more in his life than he does right now. They say it blazes like hellfire, hatred—but it’s a actually a solid thing, black and warped and twisting as it scrapes at his bones with jagged edges and a hardness that he could shatter himself against if he isn’t careful. How woefully ignorant he was, until now.

“Fine,” she says, and he can  _hear_  her careless shrug, because he’s nothing to her, he’s a toy for her to bend and break and dance to her tune whenever she so pleases. She cares nothing for his hatred and his hopelessness unless she can twist it for her own entertainment. “This baby still needs a father.”

Which, of course, is the heart of it. He’s been played, been stripped open and vivisected and all his broken places laid out bare so she can apply as much pressure as she wishes in order to subdue him. In the end, she chose of one his oldest hurts, his oldest pains—and she knows, just as well as he does, that he can’t leave a child fatherless any more than he can forgo breathing.

The metal rim of the sink is cold where he presses his sweaty forehead against it. Ed closes his eyes against the budding migraine in his temples. This is what helplessness is. This is true helplessness.

But apparently that isn’t enough for her, because she feels the need to press even closer, lean forward until her perfume overpowers the vomit. “After all, you can’t replace _family_ , right?”

If he had any bile left in him, he’d throw up again.  _Fuck._

Something swells in his throat and there’s laughter in the air and it takes a moment to realize that it belongs to him—this brittle, bitter sounds that rises up from a hideous breakage somewhere deep in the pit of his belly and bursts from his mouth in jagged fits. He laughs and he laughs and he laughs until he’s sobbing because  _of fucking course_.

Maybe this is what they call despair. He thought he knew it, but just like loneliness and hatred and helplessness, he’s been proven spectacularly wrong. Again.

“Shhh. It’s alright.” He catches the soft clap of her hands somewhere underneath her falsely soothing tone, and then he flinches when fingertips brush the side of his neck. “Everything will be alright.”

He nearly leaps out of his skin at the snap of alchemy through him, and whirls around to throw her off—but then the ground beneath him begins to wobble, the edges of his vision fading into a fuzzy blur. A grunt leaves him as he presses his hand temple, leaning his back against the counter to maintain his balance as the world rolls precariously under his feet. No matter how many times he blinks, his eyes won’t refocus. It’s hard to think...

_W...ait. Is... this...?_

Sluggishly, he recalls the Crimson Alchemist and his ability to manipulate the base elements in the human body in order to transmute explosive reactions. It occurs to him, rather distantly as the fog rolls in, that the chemicals in the body can be transmuted into almost anything. You’d have to be delicate about it, because humans are not as malleable as a homunculus is—but theoretically, it’s possible. Theoretically, you could transmute sodium pentathol into the blood or opium into the brain or even sedatives into the nervous system.

And Dante. Dante has had  _hundreds_  of years to practice and—

Fuck.

There were  _never_  any drugs in the food or the water or even in needles—she just let him  _believe_  that.

He is so, so  _stupid_.

“Bitch,” Ed manages as he lists forward.

Dante catches him effortlessly before he can hit the ground, wraps an arm tenderly around his shoulders. With the other hand, she brushes his bangs out of his face, gentle like she’s petting a kitten. He can’t even think straight long enough to be disgusted by her touch.

“Come now, love,” she murmurs, all sweet honey and smiles, and he somehow finds himself relaxing at the sound of it. She has such a nice voice... “You’re tired. Let me help you to bed.”

“Mm...okay,” is all he can manage. He can’t think of a single reason why not. And just like she said, he’s tired.

So he lets her lead him away by the wrist, right passed the jewelry box on the credenza and out into the hall and he doesn’t protest once. He’s tired, so very, very tired. He doesn’t want to fight anymore. Even if he did, even if he had all the rage in the world boiling through his veins and igniting fire in his bones and leaving smoke surging out from his lungs, he just isn’t  _strong_  enough.

He never stood a chance.

**Author's Note:**

> I am probably going to hell for this.
> 
> Actually, scratch that, I am _definitely_ going to hell for this.
> 
> If you need me, I'll just be hiding in my room and pouring salt over every threshold to protect myself from Satan when he comes to reap my immortal soul and sentence me to an eternity of hellfire where I belong. I'd ask you to pray for my salvation but I fear that associating yourself with me will only end badly for you. You don't want to join me in a burning a pyre while demons dance around in a circle of hellish revelry.
> 
> This _utterly cursed_ idea has been bouncing around in my head for literal months, almost a goddamn _year_ , before it finally found a coherent voice. And it came out even worse than I actually intended for it to be. So here it is, the pinnacle of my depravity. Bask in its hideous glory, I dare you.
> 
> If you need to go cleanse yourself, I totally understand. Do it quick before this sinful creation of mine can seep into your soul and drag you down with me. And if, by some miracle, you actually enjoyed this, then you have my sympathy.
> 
> Thank you very much for reading and may God have mercy upon me for writing this monstrosity.


End file.
